Hoisted from the Archive: Friedrich Hayek's "Shut Up and Be Grateful You Are Alive!" Argument

From July 8, 2003:

Note: Hayek and Democracy: I have long been of the opinion that Friedrich Hayek saw more deeply into why the market economy is so productive--the use of knowledge in society, competition as a discovery procedure, et cetera--than neoclassical economics, with its Welfare Theorems that under appropriate conditions the competitive market equilibrium (a) is Pareto-Optimal or (b) maximizes a social welfare function that is the sum of individual utilities in which each...